This was by far the most enjoyable project this week since I got to document my life experiences. I downloaded Adobe Premiere Clip, which is an awesome video editing application for your phone. This made compiling my videos and adding a soundtrack really easy and convenient. I highly recommend the free software. If I had an opportunity to record the videos again, I would film more of them oriented landscape style so that more of the video frame is utilized. And given more time, I would like learn how to switch between the background music and sound of the original video. I think I need a more advanced photo editor. I could export the video to another editor, specifically Adobe Premiere Pro – however that is not free software and will require some additional time to learn.
Narrative Ambiance
I like that the background noise gives the video a grittiness matching the editing. the poet takes a more melancholy tone with the is setting, yet the words remain hopeful.
This was my first trial and error video editing. I found Filmora editing software to be a fantastic option for video creation. It works very similarly to Audacity, so the learning curve wasn’t as rough. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the trial version of the software would apply a rather large watermark across the video when exported. Since it was my first go round and I had already put all the work into editing video, I upload it to YouTube as a Travel Life Hack anyway and learned a value lesson about being careful when dealing with trial software.Â
For this assignment I first researched some interesting hacks that I found online. I wanted to try something that I’ve never done or heard of before but also be able to utilize the resources I already have. That’s what so great about this hack is that most people have these things readily available! I edited it with Premiere and shot all footage on a DSLR. I’m a big fan of creating voiceovers so after I recorded the video I watched it and then recorded a voiceover with my phone. Overall creating voiceovers is a great way to make sure that you don’t miss any information. At the same time you loose some authenticity by not hearing all the sounds involved such as the scissors, but also those sounds aren’t really what the video is intended for. Anyway, I’ve reached my Vimeo limit so I uploaded this one to Youtube. If I could change one thing I would make it shorter by fast forwarding and the reason for not doing so was because I didn’t want to loose parts of my voiceover.
For this assignment we were asked to create a short video that demonstrates you creating art. One of my favorite pastimes is to create scrapbook pages and collages. There something about have so much control that makes me love making them. I have a scrapbook that I don’t regularly add to so I thought this project could be a great opportunity to jump back into it. Although it was not 6 seconds long, I think the length of mine makes more sense. I wanted the audience to see more of how I got to the final project and the end result. For most major changes, I took a picture and photographed as many movements as I could. Then I created a gif and took out any flaws. Lastly the gif was imported to Premiere, manipulated and given sound. This was all around a fun thing for me to do and I love how it turned out!
After a show, and after some people had a little too much to drink, my band did an interview with a local music promotion group (Cult XLV on Facebook, check ’em out). The wipe-out was probably the best possible instant replay I could think of, so I replayed it sped up, then slowed it down. I used kdenlive, as it runs on GNU/Linux to splice the clips together, and added some of my band’s music as the background (synced up to the best of my ability). There’s some clip features and transitions you can use, and i just used the speed transition to speed up the clip and slow it down.
When I was in elementary school, we were often given an assignment in which we had to come up with an idea for an invention, something not necessarily practical but definitely useful. I always invented some variation on a machine that cleans your room for you.
My machine often took on those classic names like “the amazing clean-o-matic.” There were modiels that were like mechanical fishing poles, programmed to hook objects lying on the ground and identify their proper location. Even more spectacular was the model that made you more efficient as a cleaner, you would work at super sonic speed, racing around the room, folding socks in a blur. I remember so many summer days foiled by my mothers demands that I clean up my pig sty of a room, she would shout that it looked like a tornado had come through, that it was a fire hazard. It always got so treacherous in the summertime when there was much to be done. During the school year, there is plenty to procrastinate on and my bedroom was typically clean and tidy. But in the summers, as my room slowly descended into chaos, I could always sense when my mother’s breaking point would hit, and eventually the tension that only clutter can cause would boil over and I’d be ordered to clean. As I spent what could have been time outside playing kick the can and capture the flag with the neighborhood kids, I lamented in my torture wishing that my inventions could just become reality. I vowed to one day become an inventor who could actually create a room-cleaning machine to rescue the summer days of the children of the future.
Years later, and my room still becomes consumed by clutter in the summers. This summer, I have a roommate and he and I are particularly unkempt. We each work more than 40 hours a week and try to pack as much adventure into our days as we can, so our extremely small bedroom is easily overrun by dirty clothes, stained coffee mugs and sandy beach towels. I chose to complete a time lapse video of us cleaning up our room, to try and satisfy my past self who always wished she could clean her room at super sonic speed.
I was inspired now, and as a kid, by Loonette’s Ten Second Tidies from the children’s show The Big Comfy Couch:
Tutorial-
All of the footage for this video was taken on the iPhone 7 using the time-lapse setting. We had to create a mount on the wall using electrical tape so that we could get a vantage point that showed the messy floor of the room. The timelapse was then uploaded to a macbook computer and uploaded to iMovie.
The entire video was shot in a single take, so no editing of the footage was necessary.
Music was then added to the clip in the background, the original video did not have any audio.
The movie was then exported to a file acceptable for upload, although the file was too large to be uploaded to Vimeo or to be directly uploaded to my WordPress blog, so it was uploaded to my YouTube account.
Once the video was uploaded to YouTube, it was embedded in this WordPress blog post.
Self Documentary-Make a mini documentary about something in your life.
The Story Behind the Story-
When I first got my job as a summer camp counselor, I was worried about a few things. First of all, I don’t like kids. Even as a kid I didn’t really like kids. I could be found on the bench at the playground talking to the parents of all the other kids who were playing tag or hide and seek. I just don’t quite understand kids, so they make me nervous. I try to recognize the agency and individuality they possess but in all honesty they seem like very tiny, intoxicated monsters. In their eyes, you can either be a fun punching bag or the evil teacher out to ruin foil their summer adventures, there is no in between.
My secondary worry in taking on this summer camp was that I would be working with extremely privileged children. Not that I don’t want to work with privileged kids, but I feel a little guilty that I am not devoting my time to some kind of “cause.” I figure that if I’m going to work with children, maybe it should be with children who need summer camp. But who is it that needs summer camp? There are plenty of kids out in the world who don’t receive enough love and attention and positivity in their lives, if I’m going to be spending all my time with children, I may as well work as a force to improve the lives of a few of them.
But I’ve found that despite this affluent location and the number of kids that are dropped off each morning in a Range Rover by their French au pair, many of the children I work with still suffer some serious deficit in their lives. For a lot of kids, this is the only place they don’t get bullied. Others don’t receive any attention from their parents or are watching their family become fractured by divorce. I have spoken to one mother who said that summer camp is the only place her daughter has found a positive male role model, a young boy walked me through the horror of watching his grandmother succumb to ALS. Several children are experiencing the beginning of a brand new life having been taken in by foster parents with vacation homes in Tahoe, a stark contrast to the lives of many children in the foster care system.
All of the children at camp, even the ones that might be a little spoiled, are reaping something great from this. I can’t help but feel amazed that I am watching these kids find their way, even if they’re only in my care for a week. Children are malleable, they’re changing from day to day, so even in the small time I have with them I see them grow. So many children go from being shy and invisible the first day, to outgoing and borderline obnoxious by the end of the week. No child is ever what I expect them to be on first sight, I always try to guess which kids will be the most mischievous and I’m nearly always wrong.
Summer camp matters for a lot of reasons. It’s more than just fun, it’s where kids get to be a little less self conscious, maybe try something they’ve never done before. But it’s just as important for me as it is for the children. Since becoming a counselor, I’ve started seeing children differently. They don’t roam in packs like wild animals without conscious thought. They are autonomous individuals with agency and even though they often lack to resources to carry out the plans they make, they’re undoubtedly moving through the world with a plan. Even though they can be cruel, exhausting and unmanageable, they have also given me some of the most profound lessons I have learned in my entire life. When we camped out on the beach under the stars, I got to hear their excited whispers and see the brilliant night stars reflecting off their glossy, wide eyes. I’ve been able to sit in the last rays of the setting sun and watch the kids dance and sing and play, a scene that was so perfect I was unwilling to let it go, so I recorded it here:
Summer camp has mattered so much to me, I can only hope that these kids will go on feeling as connected to this place and time as I have been.
The Tutorial-
All the footage from this mini documentary was shot on the iPhone 7 and then uploaded onto a macbook for editing using iMovie.
Once uploaded to iMovie, the frames were edited to exclude any unwanted footage and music was added.
Using the ds106 Handbook, I was able to find a site that had free music that could legally be downloaded without copyright infringement.
The music used was “Old Ways” by John Armistead from the website Free Music Archive .
The movie was then exported to a file acceptable for upload, although the file was too large to be uploaded to Vimeo or to be directly uploaded to my WordPress blog, so it was uploaded to my YouTube channel.
Once the video was uploaded to YouTube, it was embedded in this WordPress blog post.
For this assignment I chose to take a clip of something and make an instant replay for it. I am a huge baseball fan and have always been a Yankees fan. That is why I chose to take Aaron Judge’s swing and make it a slow motion video. Aaron has hit so many home runs this year that finding a video of one of them was quite simple! To do this I downloaded a video of his swing from youtube. Next I found an online tool called MP3care.com. From there I could slow down or speed up the clip however I wanted. I chose to remove the audio so it didn’t sound all weird. It should look something like this:
And that is about it! It was a relatively simple process but seeing his swing in slo-mo is such a satisfying thing. Check it out:
For this assignment I chose to do something a little different than the description. Instead of taking 1-2 second time lapses throughout the day I took one big one to show some period of time. This really gave a different effect as you can see movement in things you wouldn’t normally see. You can see the movement of clouds and water and the sun and how it all morphs together. I had never done a time lapse before and I was at the beach this past week so my inspiration was to use a sunset to make a time lapse. My thought process was the seeing the sun fall behind the horizon would be super interesting and it was all ruined by a giant cloud! But hey, it still looked kinda cool. The first step to this process was to set the camera up. There are a couple things that are useful to do before you head out. The first is to format your SD card. This will ensure that you have the most space possible to capture as many pictures as you want. With that said, make sure you don’t have anything important on there because this will delete all of it. I am shooting on a Canon 6D so this is what my menu looked like but yours may look different:
Next, you will want to pick a white balance that is appropriate for your shooting conditions. The benefit of shooting with RAW files as opposed to JPG is that we can change this later if the white balance changes.
Next, is to change your file format. I always choose to shoot RAW files because they give you much more light information and you can do a lot with them in post processing. However, they require more work than JPG’s. For beginners, JPG’s are much easier because the camera does all the touch up work. So pick whichever format you think you would like to use.
Finally, just to save a little battery power, turn off image review. This means that when you take a picture, it won’t show up on the rear of the camera.
A couple other instruments you will need are a steady tripod and an intervalometer. This is basically a thing that plugs into your camera and tells it to take a picture after so many seconds. In my case, I use a thing called Trigger Trap which is actually a wire that connects your phone to your camera and I can use the phone app to control my camera. In the case of this time lapse, I set all of the settings on my camera, and then plugged in my phone and use the phone app to tell it to take a picture every 5 seconds.
A quick side note is, for sunset time lapses, make sure your camera is in aperture priority mode. This means that the camera will change the aperture for you so you don’t have to change it as you get less light.
The final step is to do a little post processing and turn your photos into a video. For this I like to use Adobe Lightroom and LRTimelapse. The general workflow for this is to import all of the images you took to LRTimelapse, stitch them, export them to Lightroom to make all of your image adjustments, then export them to make a video. This is what it should look like after you have all of your pictures imported to LRTimelapse:
Export the video and that is it! You have a timelapse made out of the pictures you took. This was a relatively short time lapse. Only about 200 images to make this one. I will definitely be more interested  in making more of these in the future. Check out the time lapse below:
This is my second and final video assignment of the week. In this assignment, we had to take memories that we have since we started college, like pictures and videos, that we have saved on our phones and put them together to make a video that shows everything we have experienced since we graduated high school. I chose to do this assignment because I love looking back at my pictures and reminiscing all of the good times that I have had with my friends and families. I thought that this would be a good way to put all of my memories into one video so I could go back and watch it anytime I want to.
I started off this assignment with a picture of me at my high school graduation with my brother because I wanted to start the video with a picture of me ending my high school experience and starting my college experience. It took me awhile to go through all of my pictures I have saved on my phone to find all of the ones I wanted to share in this video. I added pictures of my family and friends do many things like going on vacation, going to concerts, playing basketball, and celebrating multiple different holidays. I want to talk about two different transitions I have made through my first two years of college that you can see happening in the video. The first one is the transition I had from having no facial hair and looking like a little kid to growing a goatee and looking somewhat older. You can see this transition if you look at my face in the pictures at the beginning of the video and then seeing it slowly grow more and more as you start to get half way through. The other transition I want to talk about is the one that a lot of people say is somewhat impossible to do. I was able to escape the friend zone and start dating one of my very closest friends. You will see Alannah appear in a few photos here and there towards the beginning of my video, then she starts to be in a lot more as the video goes on and then I end my video with her in most of my final pictures. I really enjoyed this assignment because I could look back on all of the amazing memories I have made throughout my UMW experience so far.
I used multiple techniques that we learned about earlier this week and last week. The first one is how I added a song to play throughout my video. I search youtube for songs that are good for background music for slideshows and found this video. I thought that this would be a good song to add to my video slideshow. Other techniques I used for making videos were from one of the videos we were required to watch this week. I used a couple different transition that this video gave examples of like jump cuts and wipe transitions. I didn’t want to overload the video with transitions so I didn’t add them in between every picture. I also added a video of a time-lapse or a video that is fast forwarded of a cargo ship going by as I was looking at New York city in the distance while I was sitting in the stands for my brothers workout with the Staten Island Yankees.
Step 1: After finding a video you want to convert, copy and paste the url for the video into the section that says âpaste link here.â
Step 2: Click the âSTARTâ button in the middle of the screen.
Step 3: Click the âDOWNLOADâ button on the right to save your song.
I created the video on iMovie.
Step 1: Click the âNewâ button at the top and select no theme.
Step 2: Click the âImportâ button at the top to import a picture, video, or sound (do this step until all of your pictures, videos, and sounds are imported).
Step 3: Click on the first picture or video you want to add that you already imported and then click the + button in the bottom right of the video to add (repeat step until all of your pictures and videos are added to the bottom).
Step 4: Click on your song and add it to your video by clicking the + button in the bottom right of the song.
Step 5: Edit your video.
Click on the end of a picture and drag it left to shorten the time it is shown for or right to make it show for a longer amount of time.
Click on a picture and then the crop button at the top to change how the picture zooms in or out during the video.
Step 6: Add transitions or titles by clicking transitions or titles in the bottom left.
Step 7: Click File -> Share -> Email to email it to yourself and save it.
